Rainbows
by NorthernStar
Summary: Just a little piece of whimsy with Ace and the Seventh Doctor.


Disclaimer: The Beeb (all hail the great corps! Sarky? Moi?) owns them. No copyright infringement is meant and no money has been made out of this.

Rating: G

Summary: Ace and the seventh Doctor talk.

Author's notes: This takes places just after the events in "Dragonfire." This is a little "plot, what plot?" I wrote ages ago, one of the first Who fics I did. I'm writing another piece of whimsy (for Andromeda) and it just kinda…fit, if you know what I mean? So I decided to post this. 

****

Rainbows

By NorthernStar

The grasslands were quiet. Nothing moved save the very tops of the trees in the distance, dancing in the wind. Everything was at peace. A world of silence because there existed no ears to hear it. Then a grating noise filled the air and a tall blue box shuddered into being.

Nothing happened for several minutes until the front of the box opened and a young girl stuck her head out. She looked left and right, suspiciously and then yelled behind her.

"Professor! You promised we wouldn't go to Earth."

A small man in a crumpled white hat stepped around her and walked out into the long grasses. He looked back at his companion, who was still hanging half way in the door of the TARDIS. "This isn't Earth, Ace." He assured her.

The girl reluctantly followed him, her face crinkled in a weary look, obviously unconvinced. The sunlight caught and flashed on the many badges pinned haphazardly to her jacket.

He pointed to something at his feet. "Have you ever seen a plant on your planet that looks like that?"

Ace looked down at a small, knurled yellow leafed plant. "Ugly," she decided, "but OK, it's not Earth." She shrugged off her jacket and tossed it over her shoulder, "what's this place called then?"

"It has no name to Earth astronomers of your time," he looked to the horizon, "but eventually, human's will come to call this planet 'Hell.'"

"Ugly plants aside, it doesn't look much like Hell to me. It's beautiful."

"Appearance's can be deceiving, Ace." He smiled to himself; she knew that already. A bright and perceptive girl…she would make an excellent companion. "But you're right. For millennia this planet will be nothing but beautiful. And then evolution will create a race of…"

A dark light sparked in her eyes. "Monsters?"

"Beings." He corrected with a sigh, "surviving according to their nature. But like so many others, their nature is violent and many lives will be destroyed."

"Human lives?"

"All lives."

"Is that why are we here?" She asked, "to stop them?"

The Doctor smiled with a brand of sad affection all his own, "looking for danger?"

"Too right!"

"Well, I'm sorry to say you won't find any here. The only population consists of a few billion trees and the most basic aquatic life."

"Then why are we here?"

"They have beautiful rainbows, Ace."

"Rainbows?"

"Don't you ever feel the need just to sit back and do absolutely nothing except enjoy the world about you?"

"No, sounds pretty boring to me, Professor."

__

Ah, to be young again… "People like us deserve a bit of boredom, once in every while."

"Had to much of boredom on Iceworld, I wanna go and do stuff."

The Doctor smiled, "go looking for Dragons?"

"Yeah."

"Bring down a few megalomaniacs?"

She grinned, "now you're talking!"

"What about finding pots of gold?" He looked into the distance, "lots of gold at the end of rainbows."

She frowned at him. He'd been in a melancholy mood all day. "That's a fairytale."

"There are many fairytales, Ace, and each has a grain of truth in them somewhere."

"Must be a very small grain."

And then, almost as if he'd commanded it, a light drizzle began to fall through the bright sunshine. Ace tipped her head back to feel the droplets on her skin. It had been so long since she'd walked in the rain. There had only been snow on Iceworld.

"I could tell you why a rainbow appears in the sky-"

"NO!"

He shot her a look and she smiled sheepishly, "I mean, I get the physics and all that, so you don't have to."

"Another tale is that it is a promise." 

"The Covenant?" Ace wrinkled her nose, she didn't much hold with religion. It wasn't that she didn't believe in God, so much as that God, so far, hadn't believed in Ace. And it had to be a two-way street, right?

"The start of a New World…" he looked at her for a moment and thought of red hair, "and a promise that things would never be the same again."

__

Mel… 

Ace looked uncomfortable, "yeah, well, things change, Professor. You just gotta live with it."

He smiled at her, "and sometimes even for the better."

She matched his grin, "usually after you've been around."

The Doctor looked modest.

"Hey, look, Professor!" She pointed into the sky. "It's enormous!"

The Doctor turned his face upwards, following her line of sight. There, arching across the blue was a brilliant rainbow, it's colours so bright they glowed with a light all their own.

He held out his arm, "care to follow a rainbow, my dear Ace?"

She looked at him for a long while, thinking of promises. Then she smiled and took his arm. 

They began to walk, wandering in the direction of the rainbows end. After a while, she turned to him to ask, "Professor?"

"Hmm?"

"That grain of truth…is there really any gold?"

"Yes." He said and tapped her nose, "and I think I may have already found it."

****

~~END~~

© T S "NORTHERN STAR" FENN


End file.
